Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Sufism in Central Asia has Few Prospects, Uzbek Islamicist Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, October 11 – Sufism has
been a feature of life in Central Asia for a millennium; but despite surviving
Soviet repression at the level of ritual and attracting the attention of many
in the 1990s as an “alternative” set of social and political ideas, it
currently has few prospects to become a significant movement there, according
to Bakhtiyar Babadzhanov.

The widely-published Uzbek scholar
who heads the department of Islamic studies at Tashkent’s Beruni Institute of
Oriental Studies says that he reaches that conclusion on the basis of his
interviews over many years with those in the region who call themselves Sufis
or are called Sufis by others (caa-network.org/archives/7665).

For most of the last 1000 years,
Sufism has been an intellectually and politically significant part of life in
Central Asia, Babadzhanov says; but Soviet repression was so thorough that it
reduced the few who remained attached to it to ritual practices alone and in
effect ended the succession of generations that this trend in Islam requires to
remain vital.

After the collapse of the Soviet
system, he continues, many in Central Asia began to proclaim that they were Sufis
and had reformed the brotherhoods on which Sufism depends. Babadzhanov says he
was at first inclined to take these declarations at face value but soon
discovered that those involved knew little or nothing about Sufism beyond some
rituals.

And he reached the conclusion, he
says, that “the majority of such leaders of ‘Sufi groups’ were knowledgeable about
Sufi rituals but knew very little about the Sufi literary tradition,” and still
less did they know “the collections of those sheikhs whom they indicated in
their chain of succession.”

“Those organizational structures
which we provisionally called ‘brotherhoods’ and which became more active in
the first years of independence institutionally maintained themselves
exclusively on collective ritual and periodic meetings and also on the spiritual
authority of their leaders,” he says.

But now, “with the passing of time,”
Babadzhanov says he is “inclined to explain the former popularity of these
groups precisely by the weak activity of other spiritual leaders, including
official ones,” rather than the strength of Sufism itself. Ordinary people
turned away from the official imams to Sufis who appeared to be “closer” to the
problems of their lives.

For better or worse, “these groups
turned out to be not as vital and remained in place exclusively on the authority
of their leaders,” many of whom were from a Sufi perspective illegitimate
because any ties they might have had with earlier sheikhs had been broken in
Soviet times.

Those Muslims who after 1991 spoke
about Sufism as “’the golden inheritance’” often had no idea what they were
talking about. It thus became “’an ideological cliché’” that reflected “the
natural desire of the political leadership of the time to find an alternative
to the aggressiveness and inclination to terrorism of the representatives of
so-called ‘political Islam.’”

Indeed, Babadzhanov says, the amount
of propaganda about “’the Sufi alternative’ was inversely proportion to a real
understanding of Sufism in general and knowledge of its history” in Central
Asia. There simply weren’t enough well-trained Muslim intellectuals who could
discuss any of this.

The “official” Muslim leaders have
been divided on Sufism. Some support it in principle even if they don’t
understand it, while others, especially those trained in Saudi Arabia or
Pakistan, reject it out of hand.Consequently, there are many conflicts about it among the religious
leadership, especially in Kazakhstan.

There are some followers of Sufism
among the political elites in the countries of Central Asia, but they are not
numerous. And consequently, the prospects for the rebirth of Sufism in the
region in the foreseeable future are not bright, especially among the current
political establishments.